Posts Tagged ‘mimblewimble’

There is a new fork of GRIN based on the MimbleWimble protocol called Epic Cash (EPIC) that has officially launched their blockchain a day or so ago. EPIC can be CPU, GPU, and ASIC-mined with 3 different algorithms available for each type of hardware and block rewards are distributed according to a schedule that balances wide distribution with long-term security. One of the main goals of the project is to offer high level of privacy to the users with a monetary policy very similar to that of Bitcoin (BTC). This includes a maximum supply of 21 million coins and a higher initial emission in order to reach and synchronize with Bitcoin in terms of available coins in a couple of years time frame. The so called Epic Singularity will happe in 2028 when the Epic circulating supply intersects the number of Bitcoin’s circulating supply, at which point Epic Cash adopts the Bitcoin block reward and halving pattern. Until then the starting block reward is 16 coins halving around every year initially and then around every two until it reaches a halving every 4 years.

The Epic Cash blockchain is initially available to CPU, GPU, and ASIC miners by using three respective hashing algorithms: RandomX, ProgPow, and CuckAToo31+ wih different percent distribution for each one starting with higher CPU advantage and slowly transitioning to GPUs and then ASICs. Since for the moment there are not publicly available CuckAToo31+ ASIC miners the algo is available for GPUs as well, however work is being done by multiple manufacturers and maybe by the end of this year or early next year such devices might become available on the market (optimistically speaking). So far, so good the project looks interesting and promising, though not everything seems to be that great for non-advanced users interested in mining EPIC.

First of all EPIC can currently be only solo mined and since it is based on GRIN codebase, just like GRIN it is not that user friendly running and mining it. LINUX users have a better advantage as for example the CUDA GPU miner is not officially available for Windows yet and the OpenCL one is giving trouble and using third party ProgPow miners for solo mining the coin is also a kind of a challenge with no pool available yet. CPU mining is working pretty well with the available miner, but solo mining with the already high difficulty could be a challenge for most users to mine even one block. mining pools should be coming out shortly with talk about icemining probably being the first on the train, though nothing official about that yet.

One of the major issues with the GRIN project has been resolved – the lack of an easy to use GUI wallet for Windows users… and there is more than one option available. The design of the Grin project does not rely on using addresses like we are used to with most other crypto currencies as a means to send and receive coins and that makes transfers a bit more complex. The GrinPurse project is not an official wallet, but a third party project that has been available for a bit already as closed source software developed by a crypto exchange, though the source code has now been made available as well. GrinPurse is not only available for Windows users, but also for Mac OS users.

GrinPlusPlus (Grin++) is a bit more complex project that offers a complete Windows-compatible C++ implementation of the Grin (MimbleWimble) protocol meaning a full node and a GUI wallet for Windows users. More advanced users and ones that want to be able to run their own local node along with the GUI wallet on Windows can opt out to try this particular project that has been available for a few days as a mainnet release. Now not only more advanced Linux users, but also regular users are able to easily use their own wallet and not rely on exchanges to store their Grin coins.

It is worth mentioning that BitGrin, a fork from Grin, has released an official GUI wallet for Windows and Mac OS users last month for their project and that has sparkled some controversy why Grin still does not offer an official GUI wallet (they still do not). Mac OS users had a solution for a while for a simple GUI wallet in the fork of the SuperGrin Wallet released back in February.

Grin is a new crypto project for creating a the private and lightweight mimblewimble blockchain that would provide electronic transactions for everyone without censorship or restrictions. The algorithm that Grin uses is Cuckoo Cycle with 1 minute block time, 60 GRIN block reward and no limit on coin supply or reward halving. There is not going to be any ICO, founders reward, pre-mine or masternodes available for this project, so people that do not like any of these should be Ok with this project. Miners for Grin are still currently being developed, although there are some already announced or available, though initially it could be a bit of a challenge to make things work with the right miner and pool. For instance the official MWGrinPool is currently not taking new registrations, though new pools should be available as alternatives. There are already a couple of options for pools on the Testnet where you can test the mining before the Mainnet launch like Spark Pool.

The official open-source Grin Miner software is currently only available for Linux and Mac OS X and it supports both CUDA and OpenCL mining. For miners looking for Windows miners there is the Grin Gold Miner (with 1% fee for the Grin Development Fund and 1% fee for further miner development), although it also works with Linux) that supports all AMD and NVIDIA 8GB cards (requires a GPU with 8GB VRAM!). Do note however that Nvdia RTX 8GB cards need Linux or Windows 7 due to memory addressing issues. RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti are fastest in terms of performance if you manage to make them work, OpenCL code for AMD cards is currently still being optimized. Cheaper slower Celeron CPUs are not recommended for many cards on the system (similar to Merit and BITC that also use the same algorithm for mining). Another alternative for Windows miners should be the GrinPro Miner that is not yet available for download and that will have 2% developer fee. This miner should work on AMD and Nvidia GPUs with 8GB VRAM, although it promises upcoming support for 6GB VRAM cards as well, so that could be interesting for some users.

Unfortunately zjazz, who was pretty active in miner development for Cuckoo Cycle support for Merit and BITC hasn’t updated his miner for a while and will probably not be supporting Grin mining at least for the moment. The latest version of Bminer that was just made available however also comes with experimental support for mining Grin, so you might want to check it out as well. Do note that it is a closed source miner with 2% developer fee, so have that in mind as well when checking out different miners for Grin. The latest version of the closed source miner NBMiner has also just added support for the Cuckaroo algorithm used by Grin (both Windows and Linux), so you can give it a try as well (Nvidia only).

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